The Musical Innertube - Volume 2, Number 160 - Ian Bogost

JOHN

At one time, the minivan, touted as the perfect vehicle, was seemingly everywhere on American roads. But after a sales peak of 1.3 million in 2000, sales have declined almost 80%. What happened and why? Here today to discuss his recent Atlantic article titled “The Death of the Minivan” is Ian Bogost. Ian is a much-published writer, cultural commentator and video game designer. He's also a professor at Washington University in Saint Louis, and of course, as we just said, he's a contributing editor at The Atlantic. Welcome to the Musical Innertube, Ian.

IAN

Hey, thanks so much for having me.

JOHN

You bet! We really loved reading “The Death of the Minivan.”

IAN

Thanks so much. It was fun to do.

JOHN

For the better part of two decades, minivans seem to be everywhere. I ought to know, I personally drove two of them into the ground!  But now only four makers sell such cars, as you point out, and it's such a great read, very sharply perceptive. So, let's begin by asking you what kind of vehicle did you ride in as a child and what are your memories of it?

IAN

Oh, wow. OK. So, we had land yachts when I was a kid. I remember the first car I remember riding in. It was my parents’, like, 1970 Oldsmobile Delta 88.

DON

Oh yeah.

IAN

Bench seat in front. You just kind of slid around back and forth on the vinyl.

JOHN

Mm-hmm.

IAN

Then in the early 80s, they got a Buick, like a giant Buick, similar kind of car. So that's the kind of car I rode in. We never had a minivan or a or a station wagon when I was a kid. But man, those cars were big.

JOHN

Did you have good feelings about getting into it as a kid, or was it just, you know, the workhorse?

IAN

I mean, I remember the car as being a place that I generally didn't want to be. I think this is true of most kids in America where you're stuck in the car.  You don't have anything to do. You're being carted somewhere that you maybe didn't choose to go, or that you did choose to go, but it still takes a long time to get there because you live in America, and it takes a long time to drive places. Or you're on the road - I grew up in the in the southwestern US, and you know the distance between actual places was so vast that, hours and hours and hours sitting there, and we didn't have, you know, we didn’t have the Internet, and we didn't have, like, iPads and stuff. So, you would do activity books, or like, cards or whatever. So, I think boredom is a standout sense of automobile life in the city or out of it.

DON

Sure. Yeah. I remember when I was a kid, I don't know if my dad was ahead of the curve or whatever, but this was in the late 60s, early 70s and he got himself a van, a smaller van, but like one of those box vans, like a delivery van, except it had seats in it and the engine for the van was between the two front seats inside the car. And so, when we got in there, we would fill in the back seats and - we had a large family, my parents had eight kids - so at one point, my father got the great idea of putting a piece of foam on the engine cover and that would become another seat. Well, you didn't want to be the kid that sat on the seat because that got really hot really fast! He had that van for years, and talk about driving something into the ground. When we got old enough to drive ourselves, he kind of gave it to one of my younger brothers, who then literally drove it into something. I can't remember what it was, but that was a workhorse and that was very early on. And again, you're right, most of the other families that we dealt with had station wagons. That was the big thing at the time.

IAN

Yeah. Yeah, that was the family car. And you know the, the Volkswagen microbus, of course predated the family van, that big, boxy uh front flat-fronted truck that wasn't seen as a family vehicle initially, and eventually became kind of a very euro-oriented, you know, camper conversion, so to speak. But those are like, driving a room around, you know. A weird boxy room.

JOHN

You know it, it seems to me, you've written about pleasure and boredom in different ways in in your writing, and it occurs to me, as you were speaking, I have heard so many people talk about their experience of being basically captives as kids, and going on long drives, often pointless. I heard an interview with Bruce Springsteen just the other day where he said his dad used to just pile everybody into their two-tone Ford station wagon, which I remember because we had one in the 50s, and just driving, and he used to look out the window and watch the telephone wires go up and down, up and down for hours.

IAN

Yeah, you're right. Yeah, yeah, that sort of rhythm. I mean, the idea of driving as an activity unto itself is also, it's a it's a very old one. And, you know, the idea of the touring car, which we still sometimes think of - you can get a Chrysler Pacifica minivan in the, like, the touring trim, you know, and like, well, what does that mean? That's just a name for it. You know, about 100 years ago, a touring car was car that you just you just drove around to drive, just to be on the road as a kind of activity unto itself. And then like that idea of the Parkway that arose, and they were sort of very, very famous for Robert Moses and others for their design of these parkways, for people to enjoy the pleasure of driving, of being in the car. And you couldn't be there if you weren’t in a car. But that that pleasure, and of course, the associated displeasure of being in the vehicle, it's something that's just very American and very, very much attached to the American experience of the automobile, partly because we had such vast distances. But we know with respect to the minivan or the wagon, by the time we get to the late 60s, early, early 70s, you know, suburbia has fully happened. And so there is just for most people, for most families, there's distance between home and work, between the places that you would need to go in your daily life.

DON

Well, I remember some of those drives that we took, the Sunday drives, were to my grandmother's house, and that was a good hour away because we were in the suburbs, and she was still - this was outside Los Angeles, and she was in South Gate, which is a bedroom community to LA, but it's still pretty much within the scope of the of the megalopolis, and we were in Orange County. We moved to the real suburbs. And so yeah, just to get to grandmother's house for a Sunday dinner was an hour drive. And before the Interstate system fully established itself, we would take roads through Long Beach and through other cities where we would - the amount of time we spent in the car was added to because of all the stoplights and all the downtowns, we had to go through.

JOHN

Oh gosh. Yeah, right. Oh my God.

IAN

You know, there's something I didn't get to talk about in the story, there's a sort of brief mention of it with, you know, people need more room in their car, this is what I said in the store, people need more room in their cars these days because they have more kids and the kids have bigger car seats and  they have to be in them for a  longer period. But, you know, back in in the 70s and even in the 80s, and before, certainly, we talk about like “piling into the car,” “piling the kids into the car.” You really meant you just, like, throw as many people in as possible they would be in the bed with these, like, jump seats in the back of the station wagon. Or you just kind of fit as many people on those bench seats as you as you could. And you know, that experience of being strapped in to your own little pilot seat, you know, like my kids had, that wasn't always the case. And I do think that need, I mean obviously it wasn't as safe although you know, maybe we've overextended our obsession with, with safety at other costs, but it was it was a way of being a little freer, you know, a little more in your own body rather than in the car.

JOHN

I love the locution “piling into the car” because we all used it, and one of its connotations is, pre-seat belt, it's just get in quickly, a lot of you. And so yeah, then there was something, we used to call it “the way back,” was to sit in the enormously distant section of the car. Right, Don? I mean it's all the way back there. And it was very uncomfortable with these little sort of flip up seats.

IAN

Right.

JOHN

And often, that's where all the little kids were sent. And so there might be up to five of us sort of holding on for dear effin’ life - it's sort of interesting how piling into the car these days, strangely enough - and maybe it's because of that emphasis on safety - you don't pile anymore, you can't pile. You gotta....

IAN

You really can't! Yeah, it's just a relic. We, we sometimes use the word, but we don't really need in any longer. I mean, the things that that, that people used to do in vehicles or the way that they used to ride in them. I mean it was, you know, by contemporary standards. Just bananas. I remember having a friend as a kid who's, he had this kind of like, slimy, you know, early 80s, dad, you know, a Members Only jacket kind of dude...

JOHN

I can see him! I can see him!

IAN

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know everything about him, just from that! He bought this Porsche 944 and you know like a two-seaters, but we would still, you know, I would go visit him, we would still like get two or three or four kids somehow into that two-seater Porsche, like, people stacked in the in the back hatch somehow...

JOHN

Yeah!

IAN

Just banana stuff that you would never do anymore. You know, it's just not - and it wasn't good at the time. It was really more just that there was this kind of exploration of the interiority of vehicles, and I think that experimentation, which was happening in the 60s and 70s, you know the design of the minivan happens in the late 1970s, we've kind of lost that. Like, all cars are the same now and they, I mean, they all look like sneakers, that's kind of the line I use in the article.

JOHN

Yeah, they look like shoes. They do.

IAN

Yeah, I mean as much as people love to hate the Tesla cyber truck, mostly, perhaps, because they have bad feelings about Tesla or Elon Musk, it is at least something different. It’s something different on the road, which we haven't really had for a very long time.

JOHN

It's kind of breathtaking. It's sort of like I find it startlingly ugly, and yet when I see one, it's so different, at least for now. Maybe everything will go that way, and everybody will drive their own Batmobile. But it's...

IAN

Yeah.

JOHN

It's true about the Tesla design. It's meant it's really very aggressive and it just, you know...

IAN

Yeah. Yeah, it is. It is that that it's larger than it seems. When you see one in person, it feels hulking in a way that I didn't expect, at least. And, you know, there have been kind of a long history of those startling vehicle designs, things that you've never seen before, and the minivan was certainly one of them. When it when it first arrived in 83, you know, seems like, wow, oh my gosh, you have a minivan. And there have been better and worse versions of it. You know, there's like the, that Pontiac Aztec, you know that ghastly pop art van?

DON

Wow. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

IAN

The Chrysler PT Cruiser had that feature for a while, and a lot of Chrysler cars actually, what was that Dodge that that had that sort of sort of swoopy hot rod kind of look? I can't remember the name of the model. And you know it's rare these days to see novelty and design on, you know, not just in the auto show or in the concept car.

DON

I had to question the PT Cruiser, and who exactly they were aiming it to. In my experience, it wound up being purchased by old people, by people in their 60s and 70s, I guess because it was a throwback car. It looked like a 30s car, you know.

IAN

Yeah, yeah, it had that throwback. It had that throwback. I owned one for a little while, and it wasn't a great car, but it I remember in those early days it would get looks, you know, the valet would park it close. Maybe that's the test.

DON

Yeah, just to give a little extra pizzazz. One last thing to the safety, that I recall, where we were going to baseball games, where the entire 9- or 10-man team would pile in the back of one of the fathers' pickup trucks and ride in an open pickup truck with nothing holding us down and hoping that we would hit a bump. So we would...

IAN

Oh yeah. Sure.

DON

All kind of fly up in the air.

JOHN

Wheee!

IAN

Yeah, it's, I mean, a kind of stereotypically common, you know, American roadway scene really. You know, if you saw that today, you'd be you'd be aghast! It’d be all over the internet.

DON

Exactly. And probably the cops would pull him over and ticket him. And the guy couldn't go any farther.

IAN

Yeah, yeah.

DON

What was interesting, also, in your article, was the evolution of the minivan into, eventually, the SUV. And how that took over. And I was wondering, in your article, you say basically people got bored with the minivan because it was so utilitarian, and kind of the SUV because it was based on a 4 by 4, which was an off-road kind of experience, that sort of tempted people to get out of the rut of the minivan and get into something that, quote, was more exciting.

IAN

Yeah, I mean, there's this concept in advertising called associative marketing, associative advertising. And basically, the principle of it is, you know, instead of telling you about the properties of the products - here's what it can do for you, “It's got, three rows of seats,” for example - associative advertising connects a product with some aspiration or some concepts, some lifestyle. Most marketing today is sort of lifestyle marketing like that. We don't really use things anymore, we sort of pretend to be certain kinds of people with them. And the SUV evolved out of the 4 by 4, as you said, and there was a time when, you know, if you owned a 4 by 4 - well, first of all, it was a truck. It was a big truck. It was heavy duty. It was uncomfortable to ride in. It was difficult to drive. It got terrible gas mileage. It rode like a truck. So, if you had like a Suburban or one of those - the best you could do is like those, the Jeeps, you know, the, the smaller one was the Cherokee at the time, or what was the one with the wood paneling, the Wagoneer? That's another kind of classic family car of the 70s.

JOHN

Oh, my goodness.

IAN

But you know their purpose, their functional purpose, was having 4-wheel drive, so you could, you know, drive it in bad weather or off-road. But, you know, this is America, and that's sort of open road, association with the wilderness, with being in in nature, with forging your own path, and not taking the freeway, and not taking the city boulevards, that's a very strong notion. And when you're sitting there in traffic in your station wagon or in your minivan later, and you realize I am just one of the rats in the rat race, and it it's a different kind of rat race, I'm taking my kids to baseball instead of getting to work, you start to feel like your soul is lost. And I do think that the decline of the minivan or this this sort of uncool association the minivan had, isn't so much about the design of the vehicle - it became associated with the design, - but it was first about the uncool-ness of family life, of parenthood, of the duties and obligations that came with all of the things that the minivan facilitated. And this SUV, it didn't arrive, it wasn't new. But it began to be more drivable. They were based more on auto chassis. They had front wheel drive instead of 4-wheel drive, which is hilarious. You could, you know, they fit more people slightly, but usually they weren't three row seats. They had a hatch, which is, you know, extremely useful, no matter what kind of car you have. But mostly they had that association with being out of the city, out of your life, someone else, somewhere else. And that association, I think, is what  drove the rise of the of the SUV and its takeover of the American roads. Because, like, on paper, it is absolutely less useful. It's a worse car for families.

JOHN

Oh, it is. And Ian, you know, I've been thinking about the SUV since reading your article. I realized the SUV has changed via the available landscape to drivers that don't drive SUVs, because SUVs are tall. You can't see around them. And so in in traffic jams there's really very little forward vision. It's a very strange knock-on effect of everybody driving the same kind of car.

IAN

That's right. And people, when they experience that, they think well next time I get a car, you know, I gotta get one of these high up vehicles so I can see the road in front of me, so I can feel safer. And that just creates this kind of snowball effect. And you know you can trace that sentiment, you know, way back, I mean, decades, even in the late 80s, it became, as these kind of vehicles became increasingly popular and they hadn't yet become as popular as they did in the late 90s - that’s really when the SUV boom really started - but people would say, you know, gosh, I can't see over these cars anymore on the road. You know, I’m gonna get a truck or even a minivan. That was one of the motivations for people who didn't need a minivan, to get one because it sat a little higher.

JOHN

Yes, yes, you heard it all the time.

DON

Yeah. And there was a thing, I think maybe late 90s, early 2000s where there - I was reporting on television, and I got sent out to a lot of stories where there was a trend of bigger cars, where trucks were  the best selling cars, the Ford F-150 was selling thousands and thousands or millions of cars every year as the top seller.

IAN

Right.

DON

And, of course, this was right around the time when people were starting to get worried about fuel, and also the emissions that these cars were putting out. So that was a big conflict there. There was one group of people that were saying we can't have these big cars because they're, you know, they're tough on the roads, and they're tough on the environment. And then there was America saying, “I want a huge car.”

IAN

Yeah, and that never really changed. You know, we go through cycles.  We've had these, many cycles of concerns about fuel economy, and cycles about concerns about the environment. You're right about the wear on the road, the heavier the car is, the more it wears the roads, although the minivans are hardly light. But you know, we live in a market economy, and people, they vote with their wallets, and America has said I want big truck-like cars, that's what I want to drive. And you know, there's just fewer and fewer options on the road in general, in a lot of ways. Like, I can't play to the data on this right now off the top of my head, but the variety of colors of cars have also reduced. There's basically black, white, grey, maybe one other. And if you look at a parking lot, go to Target or something, and look at the parking lot. It's all these monotone colors in the in the lot, and you know, used to have all sorts of all sorts of color, blue, and red, and yellow, and olive green or whatever, you know, avocado. So that's another sign of just the way that the whole marketplace of vehicles has homogenized. And, of course, at the same time as all this is happening, you've got this kind of culture war conflict. Where people who are, you could say, fortunate, I suppose they would say, fortunate, fortunate enough to live in, you know, dense modernist American cities, of which there are very few where they can take public transit and they can walk, they can bike, they can use micro-mobility services like scooters or E bikes are increasingly popular, you know, and that has created this sort of sense that it's even worse to own these vehicles that are, you know, hard in the roads, and hard on the environment and burning fuel, even though we're trying to electrify, and you know, so that dynamic has only become kind of more like everything, I guess, in in America more polarized.

JOHN

Yes, it's interesting. This is a bit far afield from our topic, but it is true that. There are several cities in the United States, very large ones too, which have available very good public transportation services. And their biggest issue is getting people to use them. And San Diego has a bit of a problem with this. I know Philadelphia does. I reported on Philadelphia for 20 years and they actually have a pretty good transit system, but they can't persuade people, you know, enough people from most of the city, certainly people in Center City don't like to use the bus for certain social reasons, some of which are not appetizing at all.

IAN

It's usually related to perceptions of economic class or of or of race. The buses and trains are for poor people or brown people, and we don't want to be around them. And the growth of transit systems in America and most cities, not all of them, of course, the growth of transit there was large investment in it in the mid-century, which is kind of exactly when all of the civil rights activism was taking place. And so, there was a lot of white flight concerns. The same reasons that people were moving out to the suburbs to get away from the city, they didn't want the inner-city residents to have access, you know, to them by train out in the suburbs. While that seems like it's unrelated to the arrival of the minivan, it is related, because as we became more of a car culture during that period from like1940 to 1970, by that time was kind of fully entrenched, then, you know, one of the motivations to have a vehicle was to extract yourself from, from urbanism, from urban life,  which had very specific meanings. You know, we didn't think about - you say urbanism today, and has, you know, generally positive connotations.

JOHN

It's changed, the feeling of the discussion around urbanism has definitely changed in the last 20 years. You know you a lot of what we're talking about here, you drop the word semiotics in your (article). You talk about the dreary semiotics of the minivan. And for our listeners who are not familiar with the term, and you check me if I'm wrong, Ian, but semiotics is the study of signs.

IAN

Yeah, that's right.

JOHN

Of things that that have messages that seem to carry messages, And, sort of, digging into that, what carries the message? What does it signify? What is the signified? And cars are bristling with signification. If you look at a competition yellow Humvee, that's telling you that we're at war and the driver is prepared.

IAN

That's right. We express ourselves through our external trappings, how we self-present in the world, and you do that through, you know the hairstyle you choose, the clothes that you wear. And because we spend so much of our time in automobiles in America, and we self-present ourselves to others in those automobiles because we're usually driving them alone. So, they're kind of an extension of the body, they represent you. And if you want a Corvette, or if you want a minivan, or if you want to get a practical Honda CRV or Honda Accord, that says something about you and who you are. And that's one reason that the minivan has this kind of, I think it operates symbiotically. That that choosing to buy a minivan, or feeling like you've been backed into the need to buy a minivan, Like, yeah, you  have settled down into the ordinary and maybe boring trappings of American family life, whereas buying that SUV, that still says, you know, I might, I may get out there, there's, there's still an open place for me to discover.

DON

Yeah, I can drive down that to suburban road, and then when I get to the dirt road, I can take it.

IAN

Yeah. Even though you probably can't. Like, the vehicle literally probably can't go on the dirt road. Yes, it’s designed to, but it feels, it signifies going on to the dirt road.

DON

Right. You wouldn't want to get it all muddy, because then you'd have to wash it.

IAN

Yes, sometimes I'm behind these big trucks, like, in the parking lot or whatever. And you know, they're like, inching, creeping over the speed bumps, you know, as if they were, like, dropped, you know, low riders or, you know, or whatever. And, you know, kind of trying not to scrape their undercarriages. I said, what are, you're in a truck, man. Like, what's your problem? But people baby their cars. You know, they have relationships with them. They name them, they clean them, they get upset, sometimes to the point of violence, if someone does damage to them. Your automobile in America is you.

DON

And the biggest piece of revenge you can have against somebody, on a smaller scale, I guess, is keying their car.

IAN

Like, the worst thing you can do, right? Yeah. Because it's not done surreptitiously. And it's a kind of damage that doesn't look like damage, doesn't really affect the function of it, but affects the, the aesthetics. It's ghastly.  It feels, like, shameful, like, oh, what happened? And there's so much kind of dense richness of meaning in that, you know, whereas folks who aren't car people or don't, you know, don't drive cars, they live in cities, who live abroad, they would look at this whole culture of keying thing, like, what? That's, that's... But that's something people do. It seems it seems nuts, you know.

JOHN

There was a keying epidemic in San Francisco about six years ago, where a gang, they didn't even bother to smash windows, which is what they usually do in San Francisco, but they went keying. And it was so unmistakable what the import of that was, because it was racial, it was class, it was the defacement of identity, saying, OK, we know you're richer. We know you live in a better place. We do know you're parked in the street, and you’re fair game, and we're going to make you a little bit uglier.

IAN

Yeah. And there's a there's a pride, you know, they successfully attacked the kind of hubristic pride of appearance that's associated with those kind of lifestyles in a way that I'm sure got under those folks' skins exactly the way that it was intended to do. And you know, I know this is a little bit far afield, but, generally speaking, automobiles are less resilient than they used to be. They’re certainly harder to maintain on your own because they're basically just computers.

JOHN

You can't, you can't work on your own car.

IAN

You really can't.

JOHN

It's been a long time.

IAN

But you used to. They used to be less fragile, you know, keying notwithstanding. You had a bumper on your car, you know, there was an actual piece of rubber. And if you accidentally bumped something, a post when you're parking, or even another car at a stop, it was there to prevent damage. Now, if you barely touch it, you’ve got, like, $6000 in in body work to repair. And I think that has also accelerated the sense of connection, and of identity, good and bad, that people have with their cars. Because they do feel so fragile, and they make you feel fragile in them. And you sometimes hear people talk about, like, feeling at risk on the road, or their kids are.

JOHN

Endangered.

IAN

So, I need a bigger car, because there's all these bigger cars. And that's been around for a while too. You remember the “Baby on Board” sign trends that are in the late 1980s when that arose.

DON

Yeah, yeah.

JOHN

Yep.

IAN

And that was right around the time that, you know, the minivan was extremely popular, that sort of notion of familial driving was very much mainstream. And there was this sense that everyone else is out to get me in in some way. Like, be careful because I have children in my vehicle. Even though cars have become, by the numbers, safer - they're still very dangerous! - but they’ve become safer and safer and safer thanks to all of the different, you know, measures of airbags and restraints. And despite the external appearance and the cost of doing body work, they are safer than they than they once were, not to mention the practices around them. So, all of that does contribute to this sort of sense of, if your car is yourself, then your family car is your family, represents your family and contains it, that attachment is both endearing, and you feel great love and pride for your family, but it also holds you down or holds you back, as you are stuck in your life. And those are, you know, just kind of general themes of mid-life, right? You know, the sure realization that your life is great, but this is it. This is all rules.

DON

Yeah, there you are.

JOHN

You've hit the top, there's no more.

DON

It brings up the terms like “soccer mom.”

IAN

Right, right.

DON

Suddenly, that is as ubiquitous as the minivan.

IAN

Yeah, I mean, that's a concept very strongly associated with the minivan, although you know you see the soccer moms these days who have sort of, you know, escaped the minivan to these large SUVs, and the soccer mom identity somehow persists. You know, something about kind of like, especially middle-aged motherhood has actually become more desirable, both in terms of an identity, even like more sexually desirable, right, these days? But that was one of those levers that, they got you into the minivan, but then also got people kind of back out again. They didn't want to be perceived as a soccer mom. And I think what that means, like, just to dig into it a little bit, is that it's fun to take your kids to youth soccer, like nobody, nobody's against that. It's rather the sense that that's my whole identity. All I do is cart my kids around to these activities and that's what my life has become. That's the sort of depressive sense of it.

JOHN

Well, Ian, thank you so much. This has been a wonderful automotive half hour, and we recommend everyone go read “The Death of the Minivan” in The Atlantic. It has a lively sense of the conversation going on, on the roads of America, from sea to shining sea, just by driving the cars we drive, and the meaning of that act. And one of them seems to be either going off stage or changing into something else, and that is the minivan so many of us drove. So, thank you for being our guest today.

IAN

Oh yeah, thanks so much. Had a great time.